does not consist in stripping whole States of their liberties and reducing all their people, without distinction, to the condition of slavery.  It deals separately with each individual, confines itself to the forms of law, and vindicates its own purity by an impartial examination of every case before a competent judicial tribunal.  If this does not satisfy all our desires with regard to Southern rebels, let us console ourselves by reflecting that a free Constitution, triumphant in war and unbroken in peace, is worth far more to us and our children than the gratification of any present feeling.

I am aware it is assumed that this system of government for the Southern States is not to be perpetual.  It is true this military government is to be only provisional, but it is through this temporary evil that a greater evil is to be made perpetual.  If the guaranties of the Constitution can be broken provisionally to serve a temporary purpose, and in a part only of the country, we can destroy them everywhere and for all time.  Arbitrary measures often change, but they generally change for the worse.  It is the curse of despotism that it has no halting place.  The intermitted exercise of its power brings no sense of security to its subjects, for they can never know what more they will be called to endure when its red right hand is armed to plague them again.  Nor is it possible to conjecture how or where power, unrestrained by law, may seek its next victims.  The States that are still free may be enslaved at any moment; for if the Constitution does not protect all, it protects none.

It is manifestly and avowedly the object of these laws to confer upon negroes the privilege of voting and to disfranchise such a number of white citizens as will give the former a clear majority at all elections in the Southern States.  This, to the minds of some persons, is so important that a violation of the Constitution is justified as a means of bringing it about.  The morality is always false which excuses a wrong because it proposes to accomplish a desirable end.  We are not permitted to do evil that good may come.  But in this case the end itself is evil, as well as the means.  The subjugation of the States to negro domination would be worse than the military despotism under which they are now suffering.  It was believed beforehand that the people would endure any amount of military oppression for any length of time rather than degrade themselves by subjection to the negro race.  Therefore they have been left without a choice.  Negro suffrage was established by act of Congress, and the military officers were commanded to superintend the process of clothing the negro race with the political privileges torn from white men.